1. Field of the Invention
The described technology relates to a method for characterizing at least one signal including the steps of: measuring, from a set of sensors, a set of technical data specific to the signals emitted by the source signal; grouping the technical data in a set of classes depending on the correlations on the data; and characterizing the signal source from technical data having been grouped together.
2. Description of the Related Art
Certain pieces of electronic equipment, such as goniometric equipment or radars produce data flows representative of technical elements which are in a very substantial amount. In order to ensure the processing of these data, it is often necessary to group these data in a certain number of classes characterizing the entities which are at the origin of these data (emitter, radar echo, etc.). The data are grouped in these classes depending on their proximity with regards to certain similarity criteria.
A widely used method for grouping data into different classes is relational analysis. This technique is based on the use of measuring similarity and on pairwise comparisons made among the data. The measurement of similarity is a value existing for each pair of data. This value is representative of the proximity of two data with regards to one or several criteria.
In certain situations, the similarity measurement for each of the pairs does not exist and only a correlation on n-tuples of data (n>2) is available.
Relational analysis then cannot be applied and the distribution of the data into the different classes is carried out with difficulty, except if ad hoc methods dedicated to the relevant problem are used.
For example, a <<multi-localization >> method is used for grouping goniometric measurements per emitter or further methods based on DTOA (Difference of Time of Arrival) for deinterlacing periodic pulse signals.
The necessity of defining an ad hoc process depending on the type of data to be processed for grouping together data per class is complex to apply and has a relatively high development cost.